All Things Connected

Mixed Reality – Meditations of the Toolshed – Musings

Just discovered Lucas Rizzotto, yikes what a mind…follow this kid…
The Next 5 years

1) Hands will be standard VR/MR Contollers
2) Eye Tracking Will Be Central to th Medium
3) Physical Objects Will Be a Key Part of VR/MR Experiences and Brands
4) A.I. Will Bring Conversational UI into VR/MR
5) Untethered MR Devices Will Slim Down & Finally Reach the Consumer Market

Virtual Reality, Augmented Virtuality, Mixed Reality … If you are here, there’s a chance you’ve heard those terms and many more to describe differences in immersive media. This is mostly a symptom of a new medium trying to figure itself out and the underlying struggle to understand the characteristics that truly set it apart.
But upon close inspection of today’s landscape and what’s coming next, one could say that the technology and design approaches in VR/MR are bound to become increasingly similar until the point they become a singular medium — and you can see symptoms of this shift today.

New VR devices like Intel’s Project Alloy employ some MR features that allow you to see your immediate surroundings with smart use of sensors and cameras. Microsoft’s new VR/MR hybrids allow you to seamlessly switch between both modes with the press of a button, all in the same device. And while the HoloLens has a limited Field of View right now, the HoloTour VR-like demo is living proof that MR can fully block out the world around you if it so desires. VR devices that can do MR and MR devices that can do VR — the collision course has never been more imminent.
VR+MR already share the same development tools, and soon the design and interaction language of both will be pretty much identical (specially as hand tracking becomes the norm). Future immersive experiences won’t live in separate mediums or under distinct labels, but rather on a spectrum — experiences with few virtual elements imposed on your real world fall to the left, and experiences that replace most (or all) of your environment fall to the right.

Also discovered a musing by C.S. Lewis Meditations in the Toolshed:
In other words, you can step outside one
experience only by stepping inside another.
Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading,
we are always misled. The cerebral physiologist
may say, if he chooses, that the mathematician’s
thought is “only” tiny physical movements of the
grey matter. But then what about the cerebral
physiologist’s own thought at that very moment?
A second physiologist, looking at it, could
pronounce it also to be only tiny physical
movements in the first physiologist’s skull. Where
is the rot to end?
The answer is that we must never allow the rot
to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from
the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its
own nature, intrinsically truer or better than
looking along. One must look both along and at
everything. In particular cases we shall find reason
for regarding the one or the other vision as inferior.
Thus the inside vision of rational thinking must be
truer than the outside vision which sees only
movements of the grey matter; for if the outside
vision were the correct one all thought (including
this thought itself) would be valueless, and this is
self-contradictory. You cannot have a proof that
no proofs matter. On the other hand, the inside
vision of the savage’s dance to Nyonga may be
found deceptive because we find reason to believe
that crops and babies are not really affected by it.
In fact, we must take each case on its merits. But
we must start with no prejudice for or against
either kind of looking.

Which leads me to Husserl’s Epoche

The term was popularized in philosophy by Edmund Husserl. Husserl elaborates the notion of ‘phenomenological epoché’ or ‘bracketing’ in Ideas I. Through the systematic procedure of ‘phenomenological reduction’, one is thought to be able to suspend judgment regarding the general or naive philosophical belief in the existence of the external world, and thus examine phenomena as they are originally given to consciousness.[2]

The Phenomenological Reduction

Which of course, naturally leads me to an interview with Bob Dylan (atrocious btw)

And that’s how I roll 🙂

• Cyberspace, where it’s just information, not “real”
• Outer Space, outside our heads, to Infinity and Beyond!
• Inner Space, with heightened spiritual awareness being important
• RealSpace, which only live beings with all their senses can engage

The common illusion is that we live in all four of these spaces simultaneously. And for Millenials, it must seem that way, as they are rarely out of the screen and generally multi-tasking among several devices.

If we were to Venn Diagram these spaces, we would quickly see there is very little in common among them, and each has their own Venn Diagram as well. I’ll let you map that for yourselves.

Real and Inner Space are where we Baby Boomers have matured – with a high degree of involvements in Outer Space. That is certainly no longer the case for the younger generations, nor even for ourselves, as Boomers. A lot of studies are being done here, and the general consensus is that we have gotten away from our ‘selves’. I think it is fair to say that for much of our time and space we don’t know what to do with our selves. Take a digital sabbatical, a weekend away from your devices, to see what I mean. We wake up in our own heads, we go to sleep in our own heads, but too much of our days are spent with digital distractions.

Digital addiction is now a recognized illness. And I think the lack of ‘self’ awareness is fast becoming an illness, in the sense of “dis-ease”.

Complexity theory has a lot to say about these four spaces and their interactions. My first take-away is that it is unique for each of us and dynamic. We are ever-changing beings, either being born or busy dying. Evolutionary consciousness, along with co-intelligence, involves itself with the impact of our ‘overlaps’, staying with the Venn diagram analogy.

And it is the overlaps where effective collaboration must, an only, can take place. So, at the outset, mapping is critical to any practical endeavors. I’m not sure much is being done with respect to mapping all four spaces as yet. Maybe you’ll be one of them.

That’s my scouting report for now…pleasant adventures.

Here’s what’s coming, SOON. A future mediated by A.I., VR, MR, and AR and taking place in your headspace. Ah, spaces…we live in four now:

• Cyberspace, where its just information, not “real”
• Outer Space, outside our heads, to Infinity and Beyond!
• Inner Space, with heightened spiritual awareness being important
• RealSpace, which only live beings with all their senses can engage

We have a couple of years yet to get ‘fractally‘ comfortable before A.I. starts mediating the spaces around us, but it’s gonna happen. And it is going to change EVERYTHINK!

Adjacent spaces:

“The adjacent possible is all those things—ideas, words, songs, molecules, genomes, technologies and so on—that are one step away from what actually exists. It connects the actual realization of a particular phenomenon and the space of unexplored possibilities.”

Future Frequencies:

“The book is broken down into six chapters that follow a unique futures studies process: FutureFraming, FuturePulsing, FutureMapping, FutureScaping, FutureTuning, and FutureFabbing.

Future Frequencies is an in-depth examination of the six-stage futures studies process that author Derek Woodgate and his colleague, Wayne Pethrick, have developed. Derek, a futurist, is a longtime admirer and student of and writer about progressive culture. Future Frequencies demonstrates how innovative approaches in progressive culture can stimulate revolutionary thinking in each stage of the futures studies process.” (Amazon book blurb).

SO, it is no longer THE truth, but A truth…no longer Realities, but realities…and yours probably will not look like mine. BUT, we can share via the several medias that will converge on our headspaces – that’s where VR, AR and MR come in…Real space, which all the constant ‘screening’ has caused so many to forget will take on importance once again.

Once we are all done getting over our new revised headspaces,with all these gizmos, and settle on our preferred devices, we can get on back to being Real. Except there won’t be a shared Real, only your real and my real and some agreed upon space to share our realities.

Comfy now? Cuz now we’re going to add the realities our A.I.s will be creating – in their languages, and, so we are told, possible consciousnesses (not like ours, thankfully). And this is where is gets fractal:

“As Microsoft’s Chris Bishop says, software engineering is moving from handcrafted code based on logic to machine learning models based on probability and uncertainty. Companies like Google and Facebook are beginning to retrain their engineers in this new way of thinking. Eventually, the rest of the computing world will follow suit.”

Too much fun!

So, the FUTURE === it’s adjacent, it’s fractal, it’s many frequencies converging on a particular point – You!

Whoopie, we’re all gonna die.

Keep on truckin’.

Doug Rushkoff has written an excellent and involved book on the economics of the digital world as brought to us by Google, the Stacks, and Start Up/Venture capital as it works these days, called “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.” That’s a two-for-one title for me; it strikes a chord with what I see going on in the transition from Bazaar, to Cathedral, to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley and its clones. And it touches on my now ancient adventures in the 60’s and 70’s with drugs, the counter culture (well, it wasn’t ‘counter’ for me) and the infamous Magic Bus with the Merry Pranksters, just as I was coming full-force into my Yippie phase.

Doug recently caught up his followers and ended his missive with this sentence:                        “We finally have the choice whether to use technology to optimize humanity for the marketplace or use to technology to optimize the market for humanity. “

That is a grand statement; sweeping, idealistic, pregnant with promise unfulfilled and it stopped me in my tracks. I have witnessed this digital revolution from a lot of fortunate viewpoints and sadly, have abandoned any cyber utopian hopes. I’ve been a part of it all, almost from ground zero, read, believed and swallowed the kool aid when all the manifestos, visions, hopes and dreams were first envisioned for the potential of the Web, the Internet, society as a whole, and, yes, even the planet. And, one, by one have realized it is not going to happen. And it is not the tech, it is us. We will mismanage almost every tech and tool in the shed. It is our history  to be our worst selves as a collective. We are not going to ‘optimize humanity’, we are going to merchandise it, put it to sleep by bombarding it to death with 3rd party everything. And just what exactly is my 2nd party, and am a party to my 1st party? Geez, we buy into this stuff so easily and then accept it all as our objective reality, the backdrop with which we attempt to go on with our lives.

Well, somebody buy me a cheeseburger and let me off this bus; just as I wanted off the Magical Bus trips of my youth. Eventually you do wake up and finally say, along with David Byrne, “How did I get here?” I have grown up watching 60 years of people expecting our government to come save them. Real likely that’s going to happen. And now I’m watching folks have the same expectation for technology. Well, it is not going to happen. Could it, you bet, and that’s the biggest fake out….it could, but it won’t….well, there is still the outside chance we will let the A.I.’s run things, or they will just plain take over. But, get there on our own….not going to happen. So, just let me off please. I’ll take it from here.

Now that we are all moving at the ‘speed of byte’, there are a lot of questions to be asked about this new Digital Age in which so many (about 5 billion now) of us find ourselves…and some casual observations.  As a cyberlibrarian, focusing on digital culture, I cannot help but opine. Bear with me.

WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION:

Screens – tvs, monitors, smart phones, tablets all have virtually and quite literally sucked us in to this world of bits and bytes…

We need to learn how to cope with our own devices  —  if left to them we are doomed…they really are smarter than us. And, not necessarily friendly…they spy, give away our information and locations to NSA, marketers, and the algorithmic cesspool we currently call “intelligence”. But, hey, that’s just me:)

Apps – these freakin’ things are ruling the datasphere and our lives…how do you get Google off your smart phone?…it just takes over everything, with NO apologies…I don’t want Google Now, I want Google Gone. They stopped playing nice a long time ago.

AI’s – These things are not our friends, they could be, maybe, but right now they are not; they rule and overrule, and you constantly are in battle with them (autopost for example, totally sucks), unless of course, you are a happy sheep, working as a ‘sheeple’ in some corporate box…then, you are just the cannon fodder everyone is looking for…can you say  BAAAA!!? Can you say BRAND?? We are becoming the avatars for a monstrous future if we don’t put a stop to all this and turn it around…really, the SERVERS have become the Masters.

FIRST QUESTION:

CAN WE TRUST THIS STUFF TO ACT ON OUR BEHALF AND WISHES:

ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!

We have to defend ourselves, get NETSMART, as my good friend Howard Rheingold writes. We need to become educated about cyberspace, about how these ‘digital lights’ go on when we flip the switch…don’t count on mom or dad, THE STACKS (Google, FB, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, et.al.) to help you…mom and dad are almost ‘out of it’, the Stacks are totally into it – using all our data to cross-market and demographic us to pieces, quite literally – we have become data slices, served up instantaneously to “third parties” – what a phrase that is, I challenge you to unpack it and discover the third, fourth, fifth, ad naseum parties now tracking and merchandising our every move. Its sick!! and not in a good way.

DEFEND YOURSELVES!!!

SECOND QUESTION:

What’s the NET effect of all this social media, and what could it be potentially? Right now it sucks, big time. See above…However, it’s potential for good is overwhelming and that is where we should all be focusing our attention. By now you pretty much have your devices synced…have you notices your life has become synced along with them? How much time are you spending in the screen? Can you leave home alone? No phone, no tablet, no crappy MP3 music in your ears? Can you even remember what it was like to  bop along your neighborhood and town, meeting and greeting other humans, looking them in the eyes, rather than all of you sitting or standing together looking at your screens? Take a fuc**ng break…we call them Digital Sabatticals…get off the freakin’ screens, away from your devices….”left to our own devices” has a whole new meaning now….get back to basics; that’s me as well as you…

If you do, if you only spend an hour in screens and then breakaway, you will discover something truly important….you have a life, in real time and space, here on the planet – which by the way is going to Hell at breakneck speeds…it needs your help, we need each other’s help, and what’s the solution:

Here’s the ironic part – DIGITAL….now go back to your devices, get (g)local — NETWORK, hook up with all the good people you have on your social media sites and whatever other groups you are in –gamers, tubers, tinderers and grindrs, snapchatters, redditors, 4chans, hackers and slackers, bloggers and froggers – there’s no end to all the digital sub-cultures out there now — hook up, and shake it up…work for and demand a future that makes sense, that puts the planet and people first, that has these AIs and Stacks as servants for a better world.

Start with Howard’s The Virtual Community, and maybe something like the Digital Divide, I’m not here to tell you what to think, or be some  digital guru, or to make a dime! I’m just here to tell you the future is already here, it’s going by us at a rapid pace, and we need to get onboard this digital train and start telling the conductors where we want to go…right now we are all just along for the ride.

I’m taking a class with Howard Rheingold, Think-Know Tools, with some fantastic folk and this is my morning’s meditation which I’ll share more widely.

I like the word reimagining….we grow by getting out of our boxes, finding new paradigms, new perceptions, new tools, new people who challenge us, but reimagining is a skill that often gets overlooked or left behind. Fundamentally it’s a different way of looking at your tool sets and convictions – all that you have left in your wheelhouse after applying the forementioned processes, and there are many others – it’s a lifelong journey of wonder and learning. You can’t help but get to a place of , not complacency, really, but a kind of compentency – where you become comfortable with your skills and the responsibilities that they entail. And then you commit yourself to 1) yourself, 2) your family, 3) your friends, 4) your community, 5) your world. And you shift along the line of being and doing and establish a kind of freqency pattern as to how you go about your business. Hopefully being grounded, and mindful, and in the moment. Having said all that, I find reimagining to be quite powerful…Both metaphorically as well as practically. I have tried to incorporate it into my morning meditations and to be open to it as I bop around my day.

So, currently struck by this one – reimagining the Internet as a mosaic of cultures:

“We mapped usage of the Internet, as distinct from its technical features. Viewed this way, the Internet is much less West-centric, and rapidly diversifying as the world’s populations engage with it in their own ways…Mapping sites based on how much traffic they share with each other revealed interconnected clusters or communities of shared Web use. These corresponded well with major geo-linguistic regions, and we called them “online regional cultures.“ In addition, there are a few online cultures that span geographic regions; they tend to include either user-generated or adult content….In general, we find that geographical regions where people speak languages not widely spoken elsewhere (such as Japan and Korea) are the most distinct online cultures; regions with geographically dispersed languages (such as Spanish or Russian) or those of multilingual geographies (such as India) less so….In such maps, the Internet is becoming more decentralized, or to be more precise, de-Westernizing, as more users from disparate cultures are taking over its topography by bringing in their own cultural identities. Between 2009 and 2013 the Web witnessed a gradual process of “de-Americanization”; the cluster corresponding to the U.S. has separated from the “global” websites such as Twitter and Instagram – primarily user-generated websites, which are neither centered in North America nor on the English language….Compared to the prevalent technological Internet maps, our user-centric maps from 2009 to 2013 challenge, rather than reinforce, the existing concept of an Internet anchored by Western knowledge, norms and activities. They encourage the (Anglophone, especially) general public to confront the narrow online world with which it is familiar. Further, the trend captured by our maps may encourage Westerners to refresh their own preconceptions by exploring the vastly heterogeneous cyberspace…Technical connectivity alone is not enough. For online regional cultures around the globe to strengthen, users must be able to build and shape the content they find appealing. For this to happen, local governments need to introduce civic, economic and social opportunities with new technologies. Left to a market dominated by West-based transnational corporations, the global South may not achieve healthy domestic Internet landscapes and online cultures.”

I curate on the sociololgy of cyberspace, within digital culture(s). Firstly, we haven’t always recognized nor reinforced different cultures….there has been an underlying assumption that the digital world(s) are shaping us toward a monoculture – but enthnology and anthropology, on the ground, teach us differently. So I am glad to see that thinking extended to the digital realms of cyberspace. And I am glad to have rid myself of that assumption. Secondly, I am wondering if I bought into that assumption due to some of the other assumptions about the Singularity. Another point where it is generally agreed by a lot of folk that we are moving towards. (btw, I do not agree with that, and it is not a polestar in my cyberfuture(s) maps. It is is some, you have to consider all the possibilities.  Thirdly, whoopee, the more the merrier I say, Party on dudes! It is nice to see that the WEST does not rule in cyberspace and the western values of ripping off all the resources purely for their own capital gain and dominance have little traction there. Howard is way ahead of the curve on this stuff. Fourthly, as I am coming to realize that cyberspace does and will continue to have its own political powers that may well be gamechangers, a whole world of possible futures loom large and may well require some action on my part. I feel a bit like Kit Carson in cyberspace here. I alluded to William Gibson’s most excellent No Maps for these Territories, in a post somewhere on this site. Well, some of us have been making maps… now… where can we share them and with whom, and in what ways that they might be most effective? And there are quite a few folk in the DeepWeb worth reaching out to.

So, that’s the first pass on my meditaion re this reimagining. Much to think about. And at a grander scale I will try and bump reimagining up a notch or two in my metaphysical musings 🙂 What can I say? I’m a bit of a polymath and these things can’t be helped. This is the kind of stuff I chew on all day, I realize it may not be of any value to others, but I like these blogs to organize myself a bit better.

P.S. As we have been introduced to the historical evolvement of the NET we have seen that it generated from a small handful of folk with a primarily western-centric bias…Not fair to include the big thinkers here, like Doug, or Tim, or Linus, or JPB, etc.  But after their shared visions and manifestos it was left to the underlaborers, as the British like to say, to actually build and develop the thing. And that WEB has all kinds of biases built into it, hence the movement of so many of Jah people to the DarkNet and other places no one talks about and won’t 🙂 (so don’t ask Charles). So that’s top down. But now we are seeing bottom up – a web of subcultures being built on social media platforms by the actual users. Gonna have to incorporate all this into my(our) whopper Mindmap. Nice.

From my point of view there is now a convergence of Social Media Platforms and Networks that have been formed over time that have resulted in what I am calling The Doldrums (a state of inactivity or stagnation, as in business or art). I think this best summarizes the kinds of things we see going on among the stacks – baffling decisions being made by Apple, Google, and Twitter. And it even emanates out into the political race (an oxymoron for certain) going on in America. People and platforms have lost their moorings and come to a complete standstill, waiting for the next trendy breeze, next event, next anything, to tell them where to set sail.

It’s difficult to even recognize the landscapes, if I may press the metaphor. America looks more like Russia every day. Google stopped playing nice a long time ago and had to rename itself Alphabet so that we might forget. (Kind of like Blackwater – anyone know what their name is now?, Academi, – try and get your head around that one). Apple has offended three of their user bases in one month – putting out a ridiculously sized tablet for the price of an iMac, watches that don’t do anything anyone thought they would, and killing off the 4s by upgrading it to IOS9 (company response, “well, you’ll just have to move up to the 6s”). National response – class action lawsuit. Users 0/ Lawyers 10. Amazon won’t sell Apple products.Twitter abandoning their user base in favor of marketing algorithms. And on and on.

It’s all rudderless – CEO’s bailing from Yahoo, etc. to points North. The dreamers and visionaries who started this revolution are dead or retired and Boards now run the show. We know how that works out – see Wallstreet. And the users and sheep (Applers, can you say, “Baa, baa, baa?”) left behind, caught in the doldrums as well. And as companies disappear over the virtual horizon users will discover that clicking on that “Accept” button gave away all their content in the EULA. And now the company is around the bend, under some new name, some new merger, some new corporate ‘personhood’ no longer accountable for nor responsible for all your data. Lovely.

Time for users to set their own sails, form their own networks and agree to an ethos that promotes sustainability, resiliency, (g)local ground-up action within the communities in which they live, a collection of collaborators, cooperators, team players, forward thinkers committed to enabling and enhancing a world in which their children and my grandchildren and children unseen and unmet can live a life of freedom in order to fulfill their dreams and visions, whatever they might be. The user base on Facebook now outnumbers the population of China. Time to envision Digital Democracy, or maybe some entirely new political platform – Holocracy perhaps? Who knows. But it is definitely time for something new, NOW!

So maybe it’s a good place to be right now – The DOLDRUMS. Set your sails and pray for a mighty wind.